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Monday, January 21, 2008

Less is More

Like most people, over the past 20 years I have amassed quite a collection of books that I find difficult to part with but will rarely open, if ever. I guess I have been saving them for that one special day when I'll thank my lucky stars that I held onto these books forever and shipped them all over the U.S., going wherever I have lived.

Well, those days are over. My personal goal is a "less is more" lifestyle (or as my brother says, "the more you own, the more owns you"). All of these books will be donated and hopefully someone can either read them or the recipient of the donation can sell them for some money. I've discovered books that I borrowed long ago, I've discovered books that I obviously must have "borrowed" from my high school (which I'll have to return), and I came across a host of computer books from my days at school and early in my career. Although many of these books taught fundamental concepts that apply to today, it's almost laughable how out of touch some of them are with today's technology:

Assembler Language Programming for the IBM System/370 Family by George Strubel

You mean it's time to get rid of "The Art of Computer programming" by Donald Knuth?

There are books that age out terribly fast, some that seem to be good forever.

I never touched Lisp directly, but i spent quite some time with Forth and a sort of "GMO" Lisp with RPN notation created by HP for their calculators. To date is the best, most flexibile and powerful programming language i ever worked on.

I am always reluctant to give away my old books. Not only, there is one way of saying that goes: you'll need a thing 5 minutes after getting rid of it. :-D

Joel,i'd like to say the same of my collection of calculators (HP71B, HP48SX, HP48GX...) but unfortunately i used them so much that they have all "died" since a long time.My vintage HP-85A is still working but unfortunately the cassette reader doesn't work anymore.And i still believe today that the RPN stack is far superior to algebraic mode... :-D

Do you still have the assembler book by George Strubel? I'd be pleased to get it into my library.

Believe it or not, I am 27 years old and S/370 is my daily bread. I've heard this was one of the best books published. So far there is nothing about z/Architecture so I hope this book would let me improve my skill set ;-)

About Me

My name is Joel Kallman. I am the Director of Software Development at Oracle, and I manage the development and product management of Application Express (APEX) at Oracle. I've been at Oracle since 1996, and my VP Mike Hichwa and I created Application Express in 1999. My passion is to make customers extraordinarily successful with the Oracle Database, PL/SQL and Oracle Application Express.